Slashdot Mirror
Sony Offers a "Premium Sound" SD Card For a Premium Price
nateman1352 (971364) writes "Don't you just hate all that noise your memory cards make? No? Then you probably aren't going to want to buy Sony's new $160 memory cards, which the company brags offers "Premium Sound" that generates less electrical noise when reading data." As long as it works well with my hi-fi ethernet cable.
but electrical noise is actually a real problem for audio work.
Which should be dealt with at the analog end of the audio circuit.
SD cards are in the digital side. Analog and digital sides don't mix in any sane circuit design. But then this is for people that buy those Monster HDMI, Ethernet and other digital signaling cables.
I have dark confession, I own gold-plated HDMI cable. Now before you judge me...
... you judged me anyways! But I got it on Going Out of Business Sale! For 5$ out of a bin! I had to! You too would buy one for $5. They sell them for hundreds to fools!
a lot of noise comes from oscillating windings in chokes and coils found in dc/dc converters. they often 'sing' under load, on cheap boards. ie, ALL boards for consumer grade gear are cheap boards, today.
one of my lcd displays has a really noisy dc/dc. you can hear the physical whine it makes across the room.
so, there's physical noise but also electrical noise. in some cases, I have been told that ssd's throw more has on the 5v dc psu bus than spinning drives do! I find that amazing (in a bad way).
noise on the dc bus is not something the user would normally care about; but coil whine is something that most people can hear.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The proposed mechanism is at least in agreement with the laws of physics(which is a nice change by audiophile standards); but I have to wonder what kind of terrifyingly awful crap people are playing music on if noise from the SD/SDIO bus is a large enough portion of the problem that even a 100% ideal perfectly silent microSD card would make much of a difference.
Higher end cards have pushed the spec a bit; but SD is not a particularly fast or high-energy bus. It's ubiquitous, cheap, low power, and fast enough, and thus wildly popular; but if somebody's SD interface is causing serious audio issues, the mere thought of what that designer's RAM bus looks like would probably cause the FCC to send out their crack team of death commandos.
First of all, let me start by saying I'm sure, just like everyone else, that these devices have no practical effect on the audio produced by pretty much any practical system. That said, people seem to be confused about the nature of noise in a system.
As the story correctly notes, digital systems are inherently noise resistant, and often include error correction. There is no SD card or cable in the world that will help improve digital transmission if all the data is already being successfully transmitted. However, analog systems are susceptible to noise. In fact, a significant amount of analog design is dedicated to dealing with noise. In addition to random noise, which is introduced by thermal movement or other random processes in the devices, analog signals are also susceptible to interference, or other nearby signals which can corrupt the analog signal. Nearby electromagnetic fields can couple to analog traces on the board, degrading performance. A significant effort goes into carefully routing and shielding analog traces, as well as moving sources of interference further away.
High speed digital systems are a large source of interference. The fact that digital systems involve several wires switching at "full swing" at high frequency means that it produces a comparatively large electromagnetic field in the immediate vicinity. Again, a significant effort goes into keeping digital and analog components apart from each other in high quality audio systems. If your analog trace goes next to a memory running at hundreds of MHz, it will effectively increase the noise floor of your audio.
It is conceivably possible that Sony actually did design an SD card which generates less electromagnetic interference (EMI). This could conceivably lessen the amount of interference coupled into an audio signal somewhere. That said... it's not going to make any difference in reality. If the SD card noise was having a practical effect on your audio then the whole systems was crap to begin with. So, as I think everyone in this thread can agree, this is snake oil.
I've heard lots of digital noise when mixing production sound, but it's usually from cellphones and HID lamps. On one production, I had to have everyone double check their phones were off, checked all the wiring, XLR cables, etc, and found the problem was the recorder was noisy out of spec. There's a small possibility it was actually a noisy connection on the card, although I've never heard of a noisy card itself.
For those that have never done production sound, the equipment can absolutely produce noise, and you need to limit it as best as possible. Usually, the noise floor of the preamps, room, and poor mic placement will trump any beeping you might get from pro electronics, but I do not put the possibility of it in the Monster Cable category of bullshit. I believe it *could* happen, but is probably extremely rare and only in controlled ADC rooms.
In regard to SSD's, they usually have a capacitor based charge pump inside them to boost the voltage high enough to erase the flash.
Same with SD cards... Nice and noisy on the power supply line.
Not to mention the slew rate on the ground referenced single ended data lines of an SD card, which run up to 208MHz.
They sound even better if you run a green magic marker around the edge. Trust me on this.
I know this to be true. I have a Fiio X3, and I notice that for a couple of the particularly cheap micro-SD cards I put in it, I can hear some weird noise that sounds a little like cell phone interference when I'm playing files off them. Of course, I have to have it cranked, and only notice it during the extremely quiet parts sections of my music. So there is something to this, as I can imagine it's hard to properly shield the output of the DAC properly on small hardware like this. Still, I'm not about to make a case for spending a lot of extra money, since most of my decent (ie. Sandisk and Kingston) micro-SD cards are fine.
The charge pump is on-chip in all modern flash chips. There's nothing that Sony could do to make their memory card better than any generic SD card in terms of sound performance, other than printing the words "for Premium Sound" on the front and charging more for it.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Don't you dare make fun of my $120 cable elevators.
http://www.musicdirect.com/p-9...
You are welcome on my lawn.
While I don't buy into the summary, I would caution against ever making an assumption that something isn't detectable due to its frequency.
There have been many MANY cases where inter-modulation of various signals magically puts things within the audible range. If there's a second clock source somewhere, or there's an external frequency near the fundamental then you most definitely can suddenly generate signals within the audible range.
So, let me get this straight. A "professional" pop artist today walks into a studio to drop a track, which is then Autotuned, excited, boosted, compressed, and otherwise destroyed by post-processing...
...and we're now worried about macro-levels of electrical noise coming from the memory card?
Perhaps we should worry more about what we define as an "artist" these days.
"Because Apple has a trademark on squares with rounded corners?" /duck
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins